The Internet provides users access to a multitude of websites. These websites can be made up of web pages, which can be linked together using a hypertext markup language (“HTML”) code. Websites can also include links or access to other electronic documents, including but not limited to, spreadsheets, pdfs, word processing documents and post-script documents. While many of these electronic documents, including web pages, can be optimally viewed on large-screen devices such as desktops, televisions and laptops, they may not be optimally viewed on small-screen devices, such as personal digital assistants (“PDAs”) and mobile phones, due to their different display capabilities, such as different total pixel count, pixels per inch and the graphics capabilities of the device itself or its screen. This can make reading or navigating between the electronic documents more complex and demanding than on a large-screen device. These challenges are particularly apparent in the context of websites. Indeed, the demand for efficient access to websites on small-screen devices has been increasing. Therefore various technological advancements arose to optimize small-screen viewing of websites. However, these approaches to create small-screen versions of websites have several disadvantages.
Some of the existing approaches for providing or facilitating small-screen versions of websites and examples of their disadvantages are described below:
One such approach for creating small-screen versions of websites can be automatic transcoding. Automatic transcoding creates small-screen versions of web pages through an automated proxy. While this process streamlines the creation of small-screen versions of web pages, the results exhibit one or many of the following shortfalls: the whole content of the page can be transcoded, so the page becomes very long, and unnecessary content can be shown; the menu items are not optimized; the reference to which elements should be displayed and which should not can be lost; the positioning relationship of elements in 2 dimensional (x,y) or 3 dimensional space (x,y and in front of each other) can be lost; the loss of positioning can also lead to an order that does not correspond to the reading order of the original document; and styling can be partially or fully lost. Additionally, since automatic transcoding generally removes client-side scripts, the resulting web page may not contain the same functionality as the original web page. Moreover, there can be no way to optimize the small-screen pages to work well with individual small-screen devices, such as personal digital assistants (“PDAs”) and mobile phones. Since automatic transcoding does not allow users to customize the web pages, there are often major flaws in the small-screen versions of the web pages.
In order to improve on the lack of customization that results from using automatic transcoding, another system and method has been suggested to provide content authors with a means to control how the resulting content can look. This “selective transcoding” provides content authors the ability to more easily control the style and content of the small-screen web pages. It has been suggested that this method and system allows for the creation of small-screen web pages that more closely match the original web pages.
However, the above-described prior method and system have disadvantages of its own. By giving too many of the decision-making responsibilities to a content author, and taking them away from an automatic system, the transcoding process becomes more time-consuming and requires repetitive user input, and can lead to sub-optimal viewing experiences in case of user error. Furthermore, the method only removes the document length shortfall and some of the positioning and display shortfalls.
Another approach for improving automatic transcoding involves extensible transcoder annotations (XTAs) that provide rules to the transcoder to improve how the web pages are transcoded. The transcoder executes the XTA instructions. A person can remotely edit the XTAs. Just like the approach above however, this approach also potentially improves the transcoding results, but at the expense of additional manual work. Furthermore, XTAs only address the document length and display shortfalls and some of the positioning shortfalls.
Exemplary embodiments of automatic system and method for analyzing electronic documents to optimize such documents for transcoding can therefore be preferable to make the transcoder function and perform in an improved manner, with no or minimal manual effort.
The above described problem areas are merely representative. Other areas can exist where the exemplary embodiments of automatic system, method, software arrangement and computer-accessible medium for analyzing and transcoding electronic documents can be advantageous.
Thus, there may be a need to provide exemplary embodiments of automatic system, method, software arrangement and computer-accessible medium for, e.g., analyzing and processing electronic document code to optimize it for transcoding, selecting one or more regions of interest using the results, and thereafter automatically transcoding websites, which can improve access to the specific content and web pages within these sites for specific small-screen devices. Furthermore, as mentioned herein, retaining all or some of the styling information, including visibility settings and positioning, removes some of the shortfalls of transcoding.